Data lineage

Finding errors can be a cumbersome process, but with Discovery Hub®, it’s as easy as the click of a button. If you find yourself questioning a figure in a report, you can use the data lineage feature in Discovery Hub® to trace that number back to its origin by simply clicking on the data point. This allows you to answer questions like, “What are the sources for the report I’m looking at?” and “Which transformations have been applied to the data?” Answers to these questions ensure a higher level of trust and assist with achieving regulatory compliance in many industries including healthcare, finance, banking and manufacturing. The data lineage feature in Discovery Hub® tracks all objects and their dependencies and delivers an end-to end visual representation of the data life-cycle.

Impact analysis

One key challenge of any integration effort is determining the impact that a change may have. With Discovery Hub®, it’s easy. You can perform impact analysis on tables and fields and automatically identify dependencies and/or potential impacts. For example, if a proposed change in your operational system will alter the “Sales Amount” from including tax to not include tax, Discovery Hub® will automatically show you where the “Sales Amount” field is used to address any work needed prior to proposed changes.

Execution engines – machine learning

With the intelligent execution engine of Discovery Hub®, you get speed, agility and optimized performance. Parallel execution allows you to execute multiple tasks in parallel instead of sequentially. Execution times for the individual objects are logged, and Discovery Hub® uses this information to optimize execution order. The biggest tasks are executed first, taking into account dependencies between objects. Based on automated analysis of the processing logs, an algorithm improves the parallelism of every load based on the actual data being processed, achieving better performance with each load. So the execution order is not only optimized once in the beginning, as you might do when coding by hand, but also each time the project is executed. This makes things blazing fast.

Performance tracing

All execution times down to the smallest tasks are saved. This helps in diagnosing the cause when something changes. For example: if the execution time has increased heavily within the last week, Discovery Hub® will automatically compare the time with the previous week. This way, you can identify when the increase started. By examining the execution, you might find a specific table that now takes twice as long to load. It’s fast and easy to identify a bottleneck issue or a significant increase in the number of rows from a specific execution.

Documentation

The robust documentation that’s generated automatically by Discovery Hub® can help you maintain regulatory compliance in response to legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or Basel II. With the click of a button, it will read the entire metadata model and describe it in a PDF. The documentation allows you to see the names, settings, description and code for every object. Discovery Hub® documentation includes full version control to ensure that the generated documentation corresponds to the deployed version of the project. Comments may be added to all elements in the project. The documentation comes as a hyperlinked PDF document based on a template that you can modify as you please.

Incremental load

You can enable incremental loading with just a few clicks. This saves time and helps optimize system performance. And with a single click, you can select if rows deleted in the source should be deleted from the solution or just marked as deleted for later analysis. By only loading new and changed records, you can reduce load times dramatically, improve system performance, save time, resources, memory, bandwidth and CPU disc space, and facilitate faster and more accurate decision making.

Security

With the security features built into Discovery Hub®, you can identify users and access rights, plus enable object- and row-level security. Object-level security ensures that authenticated users only access the data, tables or columns they are authorized to see. For example, a sales person is permitted to see the data in his/her region.

Semantic layer

Semantic layer modeling capabilities provide easy access to data that is relevant to a specific department or purpose. One of the challenges business users face in a self-service environment is that they don’t always understand system terminology. As a result, they may not interpret the data correctly or understand the reports. The semantic layer modeling capabilities built into Discovery Hub ® solve this problem by transforming data in relevant ways using descriptions that are easy for business users to understand.

Version control

The automated version control in Discovery Hub® has two major benefits. First, it provides robust documentation at the click of a button. And second, it enables you to readily restore a project to an earlier point in time. Each version of a project is uniquely identified and the state of the objects within that project are recorded. This can include a time-stamp, a description of the changes and who made the changes. A new version is automatically generated every time an object is created, modified or deleted, which makes it very easy to restore a project if an error is made.

Slowly changing dimension

Names and addresses change, sales reps come and go, companies introduce new products and phase out old ones. Handling dimensional data across time is one of the trickiest aspects of database design. But with Discovery Hub®, it’s easy. In fact, it can be set up in a matter of minutes. Discovery Hub® fully supports slowly changing dimensions so you can accurately assess changes over time or at a particular time. The unique optimized model for detecting changes makes it extremely fast and by far the best-in-class SCD implementation.

Multiple environments

Discovery Hub® supports multiple dedicated environments for development, testing, production, etc. This ensures the production environment is always online and available for end users. It also facilitates automatic version control in the production environment. Multiple environments provide a simple and easy-to-use interface where you can transfer your project between environments, for example between Development and QA and from QA to Production. The features ensure that the entire project is transferred and that nothing is forgotten. By using differential deployment techniques, Discovery Hub® only redeploys the changes needed in the new environment.

Multiple users

Multiple users simply means that more people can work and collaborate on the same project at the same time. Using check-in and check-out functionality, Discovery Hub® helps to prevent collisions. With Discovery Hub®, you can track who works on which projects (check-in and check-out), and multiple developers can work simultaneously.

Connectors and adapters

Discovery Hub® can connect and extract data from virtually any data source and comes equipped with intelligent adapters for some of the most popular source systems. These adapters retrieve data using the business logic of the source systems. This allows you to extract and synchronize data from any source system faster and more efficiently than ever before. The AnySource connector allows you to connect to any OLE DB or ADO data source. And the Custom Data Source connector allows you to plug into any option that works in conjunction with a separate provider or driver to enable access to data sources that are not supported by the core Discovery Hub® product API.

Full integration with existing DWH

Discovery Hub® allows a traditionally built data warehouse (DWH) to be fully integrated into the automated platform. This means that the starting cost for someone with an existing DWH will be low. The actual transition to automation can commence later if needed; with help from the features in the Discovery Hub® platform, it can be done in a controlled and safe transition.